The recruiter finally contacted me approximately three months after an internal referral.

The initial interview with the recruiter went well and was followed up very quickly.

The interview with the hiring manager was scheduled very quickly and consisted of mostly thorough leadership and behavioral questions, so it went very smoothly as well. The hiring manager was very courteous and professional.

However, the next step of the process did not go as smoothly, as there seemed to be a total disconnect and lack of alignment with the rest of the leadership team. During my first technical interview, I was told that Twitch is looking for a leader with strong "People Management" skills and that they already have a lot of capable senior engineering staff. Therefore, for this engineering manager role, they are not looking for someone with coding skills. It was also mentioned that Twitch is growing very aggressively, and thus the team will likely double fast, leaving no time to code anyway.

Therefore, before the next steps, I pinged the technical recruiter for more clarity so I could be better prepared. But the recruiter probably didn't know the specifics and gave me a very general response with no clear direction.

For the next technical interview, the interviewer showed up ten minutes late and neither apologized nor gave me the extra ten minutes during the interview. This behavior seemed very unprofessional to me.

Furthermore, there was a technical problem given, which was fairly straightforward. However, I struggled with the CoderPad tool provided, as it splits an already small window, making it difficult to type fast. One has to keep scrolling up and down to view the entire code. Plus, when I tried to compile, it spat out way too many errors that were not appropriately flagged. For instance, an undeclared variable was tagged repeatedly, confusing the developer.

In all honesty, my nerves got the best of me, and I probably seemed confused in the beginning. The interviewer was not able to calm me down. All along, I knew how to solve the problem, and he even said I was on the right track when I provided the steps to resolve it. But he became impatient and stopped me when there was still about fifteen minutes left until the hour the interview was scheduled to end.

In my humble opinion, Twitch and other companies need to take a step back and revisit their interview process. In a typical job environment, candidates use IDEs for coding, and language and API references are readily available online, as well as books that can be referenced as required. Not every engineer is comfortable coding using limited or buggy tools, and it is very hard to code while talking out loud while every word you type is being judged.

And in general, why would a hiring manager tell a candidate one thing, whereas another second-level manager has very different expectations for the same engineering manager role?

In my humble opinion, if managers are to be evaluated for their coding skills, then it may be most effective to assign them a "take home" assignment instead.

Have you received negative feedback about yourself and how you handled it?